1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a fingerprint recognition method and device thereof, in particular with respect to a fingerprint recognition method and device thereof which performs fingerprint verification by using a merged minutiae data set and a minutiae-skeleton array.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to meet the demand of personal identification recognition, recently, many biometrics recognition methods such as fingerprint recognition, retina recognition, face recognition, voice recognition and so on have been developed. The fingerprint recognition method is widely applied to various consumer electronic products, such as notebooks, smartphones, personal digital assistants, computer peripherals and so on, due to the convenience provided thereby.
Generally speaking, the fingerprint recognition method can be minutiae verification and image verification. Minutiae verification depicts fingerprint features by characteristic points of a fingerprint, namely, characteristics of the ridge endings (or end-points), bifurcations (or branches) and so on, and has the advantage of being in compliance with International Standard Organization and American Standards Association. Nonetheless, it is still subject to the issue of lower reliability in terms of smaller area fingerprint verification which obtains fingerprint information using a fingerprint sensor with a smaller sensing area. As to image verification, the similarity of the patterns in fingerprint images is used as the base to perform verification, which achieves the advantage of lower rejection rate. However, the original fingerprint images have to be stored, and therefore, larger storage space is needed. Also, the risk of the fingerprint images theft is therefore raised. In the meanwhile, as greater computation load is necessitated, errors may occur easily while rotating the fingerprints to match the patterns.
Regarding the smaller area fingerprint sensor, because the sensing area thereof is smaller than a complete fingerprint image, a plurality of partial fingerprint images hence have to be captured in order to obtain sufficient information during fingerprint enrollment, so as to establish a fingerprint template for performing fingerprint verification. Nonetheless, compared with the traditional fingerprint sensor which is capable of capturing a complete fingerprint image, the smaller area fingerprint sensor has smaller volume, and it is thus feasible to be applied to the thinner electronic devices developed in these days. As a result, how to promote the verification reliability of the smaller area fingerprint sensor has become a to-be-solved problem.